Orphaned Tweets

When people sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.

After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Both findings suggest that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

Which got us to thinking—there must be a legion of Twitterers out there who sign up, tweet once, and never return. In the spirit of the great blog One Post Wonder, "a collection of blogs that have one post," we set out to find these orphaned tweets. Different people obviously have different tweet metabolisms, but we decided that any account that's been dormant for at least six months is fair game. We found several thousand of them.

Advertisement

Naturally, many orphan tweets betray skepticism about microblogging. "I don't get it... what's the point of this thing?" read ben_pursell's first and last tweet. "Twitter deez nutz," remarked beebles, rather caustically, before signing off for good. Yet a surprising number of one-and-done Twitterers demonstrate keen enthusiasm, leaving us to ponder what led them to change their minds:

The lion's share of these singular postings describe a discrete experience or a current mood. This is probably because an orphan tweet is also a first tweet, and first-timers typically stick to answering the question hovering above the Twitter dialog box: "What are you doing?"

While we found thousands of orphan tweets, our search was by no means comprehensive. Slate readers, let us know if you've come across orphan tweets in your travels across the Twitterverse. Send your favorite examples to slateculture@gmail.com, and we'll publish them in a follow-up on Brow Beat, Slate's new culture blog. Also, if any of the authors of the orphan posts featured here happen to read this, please send us an e-mail and tell us why you quit. To verify your identity, we'll ask you to log back in to Twitter and file that long-awaited second tweet.

Update, Monday, June 8, 5:18 p.m.: Some good orphan tweets arriving via e-mail from Slate readers so far. Here's another idea: If you find a great one, retweet it and add this hashtag: #orphantweet. This way there will be a collection of orphan tweets that folks can peruse on Twitter.